How to Deal With the Total Failure of Your Fantasy Football Team

Winter is a magical time of year. People are nicer because of the holidays. The first brisk and invigorating hints of winter grace your city. And, of course, your fantasy football team poops themselves during fantasy playoffs, like a child that can’t find a toilet so he silently craps his shorts in the middle of the ‘Frosty The Snowman’ school play.

There can only be one champion in every league, so there’s a big chance that if you are currently in a fantasy football league you have already been booted out of championship contention or you will be very, very soon. This kind of defeat can be hard to accept, especially considering how much time and thought you’ve put in to crafting a championship caliber team.

We’re here to help with that. We’ve dealt with fantasy depression many times in the past, probably because we finish in first or second place every regular season (scoring more points than any other team) then get booted in the first or second round of the playoffs.

Here are some easy ways to deal with your fantasy football team ruining your holidays.

Block Out The Trash Talker(s)

Every league has at least one trash talker — that one guy that has no idea what the word humble means. Trash talkers do so because they either can’t help themselves or because they think so low of their own fantasy team that when they win all of their repressed rage mixes with their joy and it all comes spewing out like a torrent of vile, disgusting put-downs and texted images of middle fingers (or other less PG-13 body parts) accompanied by the words “Suck it” and 80 exclamation points.

It’s easy to advise you to just ignore them, but trash talking is like someone poking you with a stick; you just can’t ignore it for long. Eventually you want to grab the stick and cram in to the trash talker’s various orifices with the force of a vengeful god.

Sadly, ignoring them is the best advice you’ll get. Just swallow your pride, ignore your text messages for a while, and, when no one’s looking, stare at the box score for the playoff game you lost and just cry.

Allow Yourself A Few Minutes of Hate

Fantasy football is friggin’ aggravating, even if played properly. Every week you should be yelling at your monitor, demanding that Darren McFadden’s foot stop being such a wussy and that Philip Rivers learns to use his hands when electing to, you know, do his job and actually throw the football.

We all get angry at our team for not performing in clutch situations, especially during the playoffs, so the best thing to do is to accept that your superstar lineup filled with Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers just kind of forgot that they played football for a living for one game, which just so happened to be the most important game of your season. As Emperor Palpatine told Luke Skywalker, ‘let the hate flow through you.’ Don’t repress it. If you want to drop to your knees and shout to the heavens. Do it and get it out of you.

Obviously, when you let your hate flow it will be in shorter bursts of barely intelligible rage and spittle, and not fully formed sentences with clauses and subjects and verbs and such.

Accept That You’re An Idiot

So…you started Michael Turner over Reggie Bush in week 15 due to Bush’s spottiness against even the worst of defenses, and now you feel like the most spectacular idiot in the galaxy after Bush had a nearly 40 point day against the Bills.

This fantasy season you may have just learned something all fantasy owners learn at one point or another: ultimately, we have no friggin’ clue what the hell we’re doing. This season you probably learned that logic has no real meaning, as nearly every week you added and dropped players according to whomever was playing the Rams or the Colts and those pick-ups failed you on an epic level on a very consistent basis. You played running backs and wide outs that you had gut feelings about, opting to bench superstars that are seemingly matchup proof, and on many Sundays watched those gut instinct players have Chernobyl-style meltdowns while your benched superstars get more fantasy points than you thought the rules even allowed for.

We’re all far, far dumber when it comes to fantasy football than we want think we are.

Go Ahead, Feel The Sadness

From Week One of the regular season we already start forming a bond with these players that we have no tangible connections to. We become disappointed in them when they fail, very much like a parent that catches their child stealing. We rejoice in their accomplishments, like a father that just watched his son ride his bike without training wheels for the first time. We develop a weird kind of kinship to these names on a computer screen because their victories and defeats reflect on to us. What they do validates or invalidates us in the eyes of our fellow team managers.

In other words, when they suck, we suck. And we all always pay more attention to the things that suck than we do the things that are maybe not so sucky. So give in to the sadness you feel; revel in it and mope around like an idiot for an afternoon or seve but always realize this– if your players sucked for you, then there’s a good chance they feel worse than you do. After all, you’re just a dude that plays fake football on a computer while in your undies. They actually have to play the game for a living. Who do you think feels worse?

Look Ahead

So you’ve felt your anger and sadness and you’ve successfully blocked out the trash talkers, and now it’s time to put this awful, terrible, POS season behind you and start fresh. The next season may be a long ways away, but it’s not too early to take a look at your team and see who is worth drafting again and who to avoid like a bubonic rat. Do the same for the other rosters in your league. In fact, you should create a list of the best, most productive players from the other teams in your league in the hopes of drafting them early in the draft simply to spite your friends. It probably won’t work out for you in the end, but screw it. What have you got to lose this far out from the start of the next football season.

Luis Prada is a comedy writer. His work can be found on Cracked.com, FunnyCrave.com, and HolyTaco.com, among others. Luis wants you to visit his Tumblr page, otherwise he will continue to believe that it exists in the internet’s blind spot.

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